I can’t believe it but this is our second last CILO time of the year. I have to say I have been so impressed with the outcomes and the collaboration and the hard work that has come out of these times. You have demonstrated to me repeatedly that having the time and opportunity to pursue the passionate part of our work is extremely positive and leads to excellent outcomes for our students.
I know we are coming up to the end of June, but this is probably the biggest time to work at maintaining your own engagement, as well as that of every one of our students, so that they stay engaged and are working purposefully while they are at Keeler, whether it is June 6 or June 27…
Thanks for posting up your blurb on the blog. The sharing that has ce from this has been wonderful to see and to share in. Thanks as well for making sure you are making great use of this gift of time, and for proving that flexibility and autonomy lead to better growth than me needing to direct and tell you how to do your work. You are an awesome team!
Have a wonderful afternoon and I look forward to seeing the ideas passionate work in the blog. Enjoy!
UNFURL – Unraveling New Frontiers – Utilizing Real Learning
Crossing the Frontier that is Student Learning…
Derek Rakowski – Educator and Principal
UNFURL - Unraveling New Frontiers - Utilizing Real Learning 
After thinking about ways to make the last weeks of school engaging rather than draining, the grade 6 team got prepared to dive into a flying machine unit. Students are going to design, launch, and land planes of their own design, without losing a passenger or 4.
We are going to focus on using ongoing assessment and building rubrics bit by bit rather than creating the entire thing upfront. We’re hoping that by having students explicitly work on one part at a time, students will be able to more easily focus on reaching that particular set of success criteria.
Plus, since the teachers all want to build flying machines, we figured it would be all kinds of fun 😉
Wow, I was in the zone yesterday after you. I spent the afternoon meeting with some principal colleagues around looking at ideas of staff development Communication strategies. We shared ideas, came up with some new ones, and develop them into some real positive potentials.
I also met with the area learning team and e-learning specialist from learning innovation around innovative learning and integration of the discipline of science into our work. We spent time discussing how often science tends to be the most difficult of the major academic disciplines focus on to integrate well to the work we are doing. We looked at potential ideas to enhance integration and enable teachers at Keeler school to be able to work on creating greater integration of the academic just.
The science specialist would like to come and join us further to assist us and support us in this work and so Jean Zoller will be coming out at the end of June to join us for some of our planning time in the last couple of days.
I hope everyone had as good an afternoon as I did!
D
Today I planned an activity based on the novel that we are reading together as a class, “How to Eat Fried Worms”. Students are going to decide on ingredients and amounts needed to create their own worm recipe (in the book, each worm had ingredients added to it to make it taste better). In order to do this, they will use grocery fliers to make a list of foods they will use and the price each will cost. They will then calculate how much their recipe will cost to make. Students will cut out their ingredients from the fliers and glue them on a paperplate, where we will then talk about nutrition of the items selected. In this activity, they will be working on writing and money skills, nutrition and healthy eating choices, as well as life skills. At the end, we will be having a taste test of some of the ingredients used in the story and some that they have chosen (not on worms, of course!).
Today, Vanessa and I utilized our CILO time to delve into the realm of assessment (how timely!). We spent time reflecting on our practice throughout the year and analyzing the strategies we implemented to meet the many learning and emotional needs of our students. We really focused in on the topic of personalization and how using a summative approach to assessment has helped us gather a great deal of data and has aided us in meeting the needs of our students, especially those with special needs. We also talked about changing the tone and format of our report cards to more of a personal letter style. Our thinking is that by writing report cards comments as a letter addressed to the student it will encourage them to take notice of this information and realize that the information is there in order to help them grow as a learner. There will, of course, be suggestions and information in there geared towards parents. We hope that by taking this risk and trying something new our student will learn that report cards are not just communication between teacher and parent, but that it is a personalized guide for them to utilize as they move forward with their education.
Oh La La…. Super Duper Smart! What an interesting concept. I would love to see a finished product.
I guess it is true… All the good things you learn in life – Stem from the years in Kindergarten!
Today the grade 5 team planned for our wetlands science unit. We developed future lessons, planned for our field trip to Weaselhead wetlands and created a wetland skeleton mural outside our class. We plan to have student add organisms and information about them as they learn about them in class.
Having three significant ongoing projects in Grade 4 is super easy planning day to day…too bad our days are now limited. June will be BUSY!
We had a meeting of the minds to try and figure out how to wrap up our projects without cutting them off. Calendars were out. We reflected on how amazing it is to see our students assessing their learning processes lately without being overly focused on the product – especially as we wrap up our Race Car Project (ooohhhh – so much learning and fun!). And as we type this out, we’re realizing we forgot something crucial on the June calendar. Gotta get back at it!
The grade 2 team looked deeper at how we are going to work on our research project on insects for science. Taking a look at the student created rubric that the class came up with. The students know what they want to research. One class already visited the kinder class to see their dioramas to see what mastery looks like to give them some ideas so they area aware of how they are going to present their knowledge. We believe this will give them the confidence to know that they are ready for grade 3!!
It’s been a very busy week and there are many more exciting weeks ahead! Jen and I are still getting our students geared up and pumped about all the hands on projects that they are working on for this month. Both our classes have had great attendance and Jen and I hope that’s partly due to engaging our students and staying positive over the last stretch of the school year. We discussed how much our students are learning a lot of math facts while constructing their math projects. They are also thrilled to present their masterful poems during our poetry cafe in two weeks. Both our classes are filled with cardboard, glue, popsicle sticks, tape, and straws that the students have accumulated to start their science project of constructing bridges next week. In the time that we should be tidying up our classroom and winding down, the class instead will be a mess and in disarray, but we don’t mind because the students are loving it and we’re really enjoying watching them gain knowledge, experience and blossom into independent Grade 3 learners! 🙂
Today Lisa and I had the opportunity to go to the Children’s Hospital school and meet with a music therapist there. We were able to tour the school and see how the classrooms are set up. We were also given the opportunity to see the music supplies that the school has, which gave us several ideas of items to look into. We discussed ideas for student involvement in music class and ways to calm and focus students. The idea that we are hoping to look in to is drumming circles. Several different drums seem to work for this and we would like to try and find them. We could have some students at a gathering drum, which is just a really big drum, others at the djembes, and even others using shakers. This could be a neat way to start or end the class, the students could play a rhythm that describes how they are feeling today. There seems to be a lot of different activities we could do with this to encourage student engagement. Some other ideas that were shared were sound effect instruments and using them to create stories or adding to readers theatres. This visit was an excellent way to get the creative juices flowing.